Wastholm.com

American-style hackers don't just make for bad team members; they also make for bad programmers, albeit for reasons new grads seldom anticipate. "Cowboy coders" might be technically proficient, but their code is less likely to be maintainable in the long term, and they're less likely to conform to organizational development processes and coding standards. As a result, quality assurance -- including testing, debugging, code reviews, and refactoring -- are likely to suffer.

Newspaper ad revenues fell by almost 8 percent in 2007, a surprising drop in a non-recession year (the current economic downturn began in the late fall of that year), and by almost 23 percent the following year, and accelerated this year. [...] Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

There is an interesting disinformation campaign being waged against ODF. You won't see this FUD splattered across the front pages of blogs or press releases. It is the kind of stuff that is spread by email and whispers, and you or I rarely will see it. But occasionally some of this does cross my desk, and I'd like to share with you some recent examples.

Störs du av att engelskan tycks breda ut sig på svenskans bekostnad i tid och otid? Anser du det vara en rättighet att i Sverige få t.ex. bruksanvisningar och resevillkor på svenska? Irriteras du av att det visas så många långfilmer på engelska och så få på svenska och andra språk liksom av att så många reklaminslag i tv och i andra massmedia i Sverige är på engelska? Ifrågasätter du kravet att skriva akademiska avhandlingar direkt på engelska vid så många utbildningar vid svenska universitet? Misstänker du att svenskspråkiga förlorar på att svenska företag går över till engelska som koncernspråk [...]? [...] I så fall borde vår webbplats intressera dig.

A table is the right solution when we need one or more box to stretch beyond the natural (content-determined) size, depending on the size of sibling boxes.

For three centuries, the publishing industry has been working very hard to obscure copyright's true origins, and to promote the myth that it was invented by writers and artists. Even today, they continue to campaign for ever stronger laws against sharing, for international treaties that compel all nations to conform to the copyright policies of the strictest, and most of all to make sure the public never asks exactly who this system is meant to help.

Although it may seem trite to say it, $g(Object/Relational Mapping) is the Vietnam of Computer Science. It represents a quagmire which starts well, gets more complicated as time passes, and before long entraps its users in a commitment that has no clear demarcation point, no clear win conditions, and no clear exit strategy.

Nästa generations strider om immaterialrätten kommer att bli av en helt annan kaliber än de som rasar nu. Forskare hävdar att upphovsrätt och patent i framtiden riskerar att kriminalisera lärandet och att fördelarna är mycket mindre än skadorna de kan orsaka.

Here's a summary (no, seriously!) of a collection of notes I've been making for quite a long time about the infamous model-view-controller architectural style. I keep intending to post it during some quiet period when there isn't a parallel "MVC furore" debate going on somewhere, because it isn't a reaction to anything. However, such lulls do not exist, it seems, so time to publish.

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